A secret abortion and sexual relations that looked like rape: the revelations of Karissa Shannon, one of Hugh Hefner's exes

The “Playboy Twins”, Karissa and Kristina Shannon, were two of Hugh Hefner's last girlfriends during the final stretch of his life, immortalized by the magazine that brought him to international fame, along with his “eccentricities” and polyamorous life.

Thirteen years after the end of their 18-month relationship, which was narrated for the E! , the sisters do not remember fondly their time with Hefner. “It started to become a job right away,” Karissa said on Monday night's episode of the docuseries `” Playboy Secrets” on the A&E channel.

During this week's episode, the Shannons detail the low points of the affair, alienation and rape they felt by their much older boyfriend, as well as the emotional processing they had to undertake as a result of a sexual arrangement that they say still makes it difficult for them to “connect emotionally” with others.

The Shannon twins, who are now 32 years old, were 18 years old when they met Hefner, who was then 83. They had been raised by their grandmother in Clearwater, Florida, and worked in a Hooters-style restaurant when they were selected to do a playboy test session.

His photos immediately caught the attention of Hefner and his then No. 1, Holly Madison, who was overseeing the search for Playboy's 55th Anniversary Playmate on Girls Next Door.

Although they didn't win the contest, they were named Playmates for July and August 2009, and received a letter from Hefner inviting them to move into the Playboy Mansion with him.

They claim that they did not realize at that time that the invitation came with conditions. As Karissa said, “Hell, no, you don't think an 80-year-old man would sleep with all these women.”

Just a few months after moving to Los Angeles, the twins turned 19, a night in which they said “we realized what we had gotten ourselves into.”

According to the twins, Kendra Wilkinson (another former Girls Next Door star) invited them to smoke marijuana in Hefner's room, but when the twins got there, Wilkinson and Madison cheated on them.

And although Hefner himself seemed “super nervous”, he made a familiar move and offered the twins, who had already been drinking, despite being minors, a pill to calm their nerves.

According to Karissa, they immediately felt “really screwed up... as drunk as we've ever been.”

She claimed that Hefner began to “lower our heads, like a very strong pull, towards his penis so that we could give him oral sex”.

“We've never done a threesome together before, we'd never want to do it,” Kristina said.

“And that was our 19th birthday. You'll never forget it,” added Karissa.

“He didn't even finish. Just imagine this, just his old hand shaking as he touches your breast. It's like you're having sex with your grandfather. And he stood there, looking up, and he was like, 'My babies, my babies. They love me'”, explained the former playmate.

The twins waited for Hefner to fall asleep. Once he did, “we ran down the hall to the guest room we were staying in. We took a steamy shower. Our skin was red from just trying to sterilize us,” said Karissa.

“After that night, I no longer felt that my body was mine. I kind of felt used, disgusted,” Kristina added.

But despite the traumatic experience, the sisters felt that there was no going back and that they could not leave.

As the months went by, the twins recognized that Hefner's ritual of “seduction” worked like a clock: when the clock struck midnight, he invited any woman from his house to his room. So they said they developed a habit of calming their anxiety about sexual encounters by drinking in large quantities.

“Dinner started at 5 every Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” Kristina recalled. “Then, at dinner we started drinking. They had an open bar, so we started drinking in case Hef wanted to apply that pressure.”

The painkiller was applied every night, getting drunk so they could deal with Hefner. Eventually, the lifestyle in the Playboy Mansion caught up with them.

“At one point there was an STD that went around,” Kristina said. “We caught chlamydia. I remember going to Mary O'Connor's (the housewife)'s office and she said, 'Well, that's what happens when you're sexually active. '”

After that the twins promised to “never have sex with Hef again. That was it.”

Some time passed when they were able to avoid Hefner's sexual advances, but Hefner noticed the distance and when confronting them he told them that if they wanted to be his girlfriends they had to have sex with him.

The twins claim that Hefner didn't like to wear protection, so the girls developed a system in which they asked the butlers to leave a large bowl next to the bed which they filled with hot water and put next to rags, so whoever had sex with the octogenarian could clean it up once he was finished.

Unwanted pregnancy

The most complex thing happened when Karissa was going to undergo plastic surgery and when she had a blood test she discovered that she was pregnant.

According to the former bunny, she only had sex twice more with Hefner after contracting the aforementioned STD, but she still became pregnant.

She says she was very frightened and asked the housekeeper of the Mansion not to tell “Hef” of her condition.

Karissa was very surprised, because she didn't think it was possible to conceive a baby with Hefner, who was then 84 years old, especially after the failed public attempts of Madison, girlfriend No. 1, to get pregnant.

But, Karissa noted, “we were the youngest girlfriends I had ever had; I was 19, I was getting ready to turn 20.”

He instantly knew he wouldn't keep the baby. What's more, “I didn't want him to know I was pregnant. I didn't want him to want me to have it. I didn't want to be trapped even more inside that bubble. I thought it was a way for him to control me even more, to keep me tied up,” he said.

“I felt disgusted with my body,” she continued. “I felt that there was something like an alien inside me. I was disgusted. I just wanted to finish that once.”

The twins then told how they went to the abortion clinic, staging the deception that they were going to buy underwear. But during the outing they separated and Karissa went alone to practice the procedure, for fear that if she went with her sister she would attract the attention of the paparazzi.

When they returned to the Mansion, they found a team of cameras who were there to film their images for the opening of the program.

Karissa said she felt so bad that Kristina had to act as her body double.

However, despite the trauma, Karissa claimed that she “100%” made the right choice.

“Every time I did it with him, it was abuse,” she said of sex with Hefner. “For me, it's like rape. He completely used the control mechanisms in everything, so I'm happy I had the abortion.”

The Girls Next Door aired its final episode on August 8, 2010. Six months later, the twins told Hefner that they wanted to leave the mansion. They said he tried to come up with a compromise where he would halve his $1,000 per week allocation if they stayed living in Bunny House, outside the main mansion, but the agreement was short-lived. They eventually broke up, while Hefner married his Girls Next Door co-star Crystal Harris Hefner, his third and final wife.

Although it has been more than a decade since they left Hefner, the sisters say they are “still dealing” with the aftermath of the relationship, including a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

In a statement released just before the docuseries premiere, Playboy's current leadership wrote: “We trust and validate women and their stories, and we strongly support people who have come forward to share their experiences.” “Today's Playboy is not Hugh Hefner's Playboy,” the statement added.

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